Development of Economic Thought

Economics didn't arrive fully formed — it was argued into shape over two centuries, and this course traces that argument from Smith and Ricardo through the marginalist break of the 1870s into Keynes, the monetarists, and the institutional and behavioral turns of today. You'll read economists in their own context (Kishtainy, Ekelund & Hebert, Acemoğlu & Robinson, Milanović) and use historical episodes like the Industrial Revolution and the Great Depression to see why competing schools answered the same questions so differently. Coming after your core micro and macro sequence, it's where the theories you've been solving as equations get their motivations, limits, and politics — useful background for any later field course and essential if you're heading toward graduate work.